Helge Hafting [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Oct 15, 2004 at 11:36:04AM -0700, Kendall Bennett wrote:

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Helge Hafting [off-list ref] wrote:

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Having video BOOT would be great, and please make it independent of
the framebuffer drivers.  

Right now it is independent but I added a single line of code to the 
Radeon driver to init the card prior to initing the rest of the driver. 

That's fine.  What I meant, was please make it independent of the
VESA framebuffer driver, because one might want to use an
acellerated driver when one is available. 

Oh, it already is. The VESA driver is not actually done yet so the only 
drivers using VideoBoot right now are the accelerated ones ;-)

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It can be done earlier than that inside fbmem.c, but I wasn't sure how to 
set up the code so it would only POST each card as it is needed as I 
don't want to bring up secondary controllers unless the user actually 
wants this.

Selecting which cards to "boot" can probably be done with a kernel
parameter?  The default could be to bring up all cards except the
one the bios brought up already.  Wanting to _not_ bring up some
cards seems to be the unusual case to me. 

Not really. In many cases there may be a secondary controller on the 
system that is not wanted, such as when the user has an i915G or other 
chipset with integrated video but has plugged a different video card into 
the system. The integrated video can still be active so trying to bring 
it up may be problematic unless it is really wanted.

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How does the framebuffer console system handle secondary controllers 
right now? It seems from my look at the code that it only brings up the 
primary and not the secondary?

The stock 2.6.x fbcon only use one framebuffer console.  I use the
ruby patch which supports multiple consoles.  The ruby patch for
2.6.7 support multiple fbcons so you can have several keyboards
attached to separate framebuffers thus supporting several users.
(VT1-VT16 is the first kbd on the first fbcon, VT17-VT32 is the
second kbd on the second fbcon, and so on.) 

The ruby patch for 2.6.8.1 is somewhat broken, and doesn't work
with fbcon. It still support multiple keyboards and multiple
framebuffers, so I can support several users with separate xservers
but currently not gettys on separate fbcons. 

Cool. So this stuff is not yet in the official kernel trees. Is that 
going to happen or is the project to move the video out of the kernel 
going to happen first?

Note that soft-booting the "extra" video card in order to support a
framebuffer driver is nice even if it doesn't attach to the
console, because there is other software that can utilize a
framebuffer.  X is the most well-known of them. 

Yes, but if you don't need a framebuffer console on the card then X or 
whatever can bring up the secondary controller from user space once the 
kernel has booted.

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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